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Dec 30, 2004, 2:56am

I know awi has vocie coming in the next version(s)...however i would
like to see a few thigns with it, i dont know if they will be in it, but
from what i saw...they wernt...i think using a comamnd like media should
be allowed for voice..so on objects i could do create voice C P...and it
would display my current vocie, this would work on the level of
conferences, radios, or w/e...also if that wont happen is there multi
user support for voice, so i can have lets say 4 people talk with me at
the same time (EX: Yahoo messanger).

regardign webcams, id liek to see them be able to be used in the same
fashion as i just mentioned, no more downlaodign software to broadcats
to the net, i want it so i can have it just liek any other ,messenger,
either with a popup, or command such as create webcam C P, to watch my
webcam, yeah it could get weird, but maybe they could add sensoring? so
in their profile their options the user can set whether they want anyone
to be able to see it (use it in their builds), select list of cit #'s,
or allow only my citizen to create webcam views. besides buolding them i
think ti needs the popups also...


one third thing not in the title...reflections? everything has them now
>_, i mean cmon even thesims has them >_< all a reflection is is the
room behind it displayed backwards, and then using your avatars location
in the radius aaround it....it displays that angle >_<

Dec 30, 2004, 1:36pm

AFAIK the VoIP feature is placed on the tabs (with contacts etc, and it
shows all the users, when they speak / broadcast everyone gets it, or they
can select a private confence with someone)

- MR

[View Quote]

Dec 30, 2004, 8:26pm

[View Quote] I'd like to see options on the world side via SDK to take control of the
voice chat and force it to function how you like - for example, setting up
automatic "conference calls" with anyone who has voice enabled when they're
within a certain range - effectively reproducing a natural "talking range."
You could also expand this to cell phones for private messages and whatnot.
Obviously this sort of functionality is for *GAME* environments *ONLY* where
the user consents to this level of control by the server, so whoever is
going to come back telling me that giving world owner bots control of your
voice chat options is not acceptable can shove off right now.

>
> one third thing not in the title...reflections? everything has them now
> room behind it displayed backwards, and then using your avatars location
> in the radius aaround it....it displays that angle >_<

There's no actual issue with using a reflection system, contrary to what
people say -- it's easy to create a camera at the appropriate location,
render the appropriate scene (and invert it) and paste that onto a "mirror"
object to create the illusion of a reflection. The only dilema comes from
the obvious doubling of the render time for the scene. Since AW has no
concept of "portals" or inside vs. outside, any mirror has to theoretically
reflect everything that could be in scene, even if it's obscured by
something (a wall, or whatever); in many cases this is going to turn a
framerate of 30 into 15 or less. This doesn't make it impossible, but it
does mean that reflections would need to be used with extreme caution. An
environment with several reflection objects would be enough to kill most AW
users' computers instantly.

Obviously, the engine can impose some limits here; mirrors may only render
from a certain distance away (so, when viewing a mirror from 100m away you
might see just a placeholder texture) or they might dynamically rescale
their render framerates based on your distance from them (at 100m, it might
use 1fps because you won't notice, while at close range it uses the max
possible framerate in order to look highly realistic). You may have an
option to set the "render depth" of a reflecting object, such that some
mirrors may be set to only reflect objects within 10 meters if they are
indoors. Obviously, a mirror will be a flat poly and only reflect objects
which are already loaded into the scene by the client seeing it as it would
be too much of an additional performance and coding issue to have it also
load all objects within range of the mirror. There would also need to be a
client-side mirror on/off toggle, since some PCs would just not be up to the
task.

As a side rant, I'd love to see pixel shader support in the next version,
but I think the only way we can count on that is if AW upgrades to a new
version of RW or starts to do their own internal rendering engine tweaks. If
you've played any game in the past year you've probably seen shaders in
action (for example in Half-Life 2) giving textures a more realistic
appearence (real-time shine and bump-mapping for example, but moving to more
intense things like water refractions as well). Shaders would go a long way
to improve the overall visual quality, but would not have any negative
impact on those with older systems, where they would simply be ignored and
normal textures used in place.

Dec 30, 2004, 8:40pm

[View Quote] This is only ever done one way (ie: letting you hear other people) no
environment I know of will enable your microphone remotly. You still have to
enable it at the time manually nomatter what.

- MR

Jan 9, 2005, 5:03pm

I think this feature would be abused =/
-Matt

[View Quote]

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